"What _has_ her social position got to do with it?" Mrs. Eldridge elevates her eyebrows, and perhaps her shoulders, slightly, as though asking space what next? But she brings both down to the level of her friend's knowledge of the world before answering: "I should have said _everything_. A woman in her position doesn't commit herself in any way with a man in your husband's, however distinguished he may be. Read any divorce case of that sort of people, and see if they don't have co-respondents of condition. Of course, I'm not speaking of disgraceful cases, where the woman isn't received after. But ordinary divorce cases in Fashionable Life." "I can't see what you're talking about, Charlotte." "Then I can't help it, dear. But I should have thought it was pretty plain, for all that!" Marianne laughs, a little uneasily. "Do you mean to say, Charlotte, that because Titus goes away for a week to a country-house...?" "Go on, dear." But Marianne is not constitutionally a sentence-finisher. She begins again: "Why isn't Titus to speak to a lady without a preach about it?" "My dear child, nobody's preaching. If you were to listen to me, instead of becoming impatient...." "I'm not impatient! But you know it's irritating, and you can't deny it." "Very well, dear, I don't then. But let me finish what I was saying. If you had listened to me, you would have seen my meaning. I was all the time exonerating your husband from the suspicion of even the slightest flirtation with this showy girl. I was trying to make your mind easy about them, and to say that even if they _are_ rather thrown together--as of course they must be, because one knows what country-houses are...." "Now, Charlotte, that _is_ nonsense! Why are country-houses any different from town-houses? What stuff!" Marianne sees a light on the horizon. She knows about country-houses, because she was a girl in the country once. But much of her friend's analyses and insights had been so much unqualified Sordello to her, and had left her brain spinning. She can and will hold fast that which is good, and stick to the country-houses. And clearly, if she can prove that country and town houses are on all fours for the purposes of Charlotte's world--a world where a sort of dowdy Eros dodders respectably about, all the Greek fire knocked out of him--then a stopper will be put on these suggestions of infidelities. She does not see all the connecting-links, but would like to unhorse her opponent somehow.